Mr Mandarin Manhttp://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com
Life as a foreign Mandarin student in ChinaThu, 23 Apr 2015 16:40:28 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.22MrMandarinManhttps://feedburner.google.comSpeaking Video #1http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/speaking-video-1/
http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/speaking-video-1/#commentsSat, 23 Feb 2013 08:13:57 +0000http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/?p=115I mentioned in the last post that I was considering recording some videos of me speaking Chinese. Well, here’s the first one. If I do ‘live conversation’ videos in the future my level will appear to go down considerably, as this is a prepared speech.

我是一个多才多艺的人。我的主要爱好是下各种棋和玩儿音乐。我特别喜欢下国际象棋，因为它很有意思，并且我是这方面的高手。另外我也喜欢下围棋和象棋，只不过我下得马马虎虎，技术还有待提高。音乐方面，弹吉他和拉低音提琴是我的特长。我喜欢用吉他弹古典音乐和弗拉门科曲子，那是一种西班牙的音乐。不过我最喜欢的是蓝调，因为用吉他演奏出来的蓝调别有一番味道。拉低音提琴的时候，我不喜欢一个人单独拉，而是喜欢跟管弦乐队一起演奏，那样在舞台上能引起观众的共鸣，让我更有感觉。我曾经是英国国家少儿管弦乐队，国家青年管弦乐队以及学校管弦乐队的一员，可惜后来我没有再在乐队待过。运动方面，我喜欢长跑和打壁球。 (I didn’t say the last couple of sentences.)

This is part of a speech I prepared for my speaking exam at the end of last term. I drafted the text, then had a native speaker edit and improve it, and then memorised it – thus it does not reflect my level when in a conversational setting. The rather immodest ‘我是一个多才多艺的人 – I’m a multi-talented person’ was added by the native speaker, but I’ve left it in so I can remember it and use it for other people. I forget the word for ‘orchestra’ at the end, but I didn’t feel it was worth doing a retake and probably just making a mistake somewhere else!

P.S. I’ve created a page where I’ll list all the characters I learn to write for the character challenge – it should be updated daily from Monday.

]]>http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/speaking-video-1/feed/1Spring Festival & Character Challengehttp://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/spring-festival-character-challenge/
http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/spring-festival-character-challenge/#commentsWed, 20 Feb 2013 03:50:12 +0000http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/?p=102The fireworks started as my plane was making the final approach to Changsha. Somebody down below had clearly got wind of my imminent arrival, and managed to get together a few well-wishers to put on an impromptu welcome. They continued as I waited in the cold in the back of an opportunistic middleman’s car while he arranged a taxi for me, and during the ensuing hour-long taxi journey. As we reached Xiangtan the frequency started to grow, heralding my return to the university with a sudden and glorious climax as we pulled into the campus.

The real reason, of course, for this prolonged pyrotechnic performance, was Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year as it’s known in the rest of the world. My plane touched down on the evening of the 9th, and I arrived at the university just after midnight on the 10th, which is the first day of the first month of the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar.

I had hoped to spend the festival with the family of one of my Chinese teachers here, but that failed to happen for a couple of reasons; firstly I hadn’t realised that they wouldn’t be spending it in Xiangtan, and secondly they didn’t see my e-mail informing them of my return and so couldn’t direct me to come to their home town instead. Instead I spent a cold and fairly miserable few days on an almost deserted campus, just managing to avoid death by starvation by frequenting the one restaurant still open, and death by boredom by the presence of my American English-teacher friend. Since then things have picked up somewhat, with my teacher’s family returning to Xiangtan and feeding me once or twice a day, and life gradually starting to return to the campus. Still very much looking forward to classes restarting next week.

Character Challenge

I promised a few weeks ago that I would say something about my Chinese-learning goals for the remainder of my time here. I’ve decided to join the ‘Chinese character challenge’ being organised by fellow Mandarin-blogger Olle Linge, which challenges us to use spaced repetition software in an intelligent way to learn to write characters. (Spaced repetition is something I’ve dabbled in for a few years, including last term for learning to read characters – it’s essentially a flash card system which allows you to review information at intervals which correspond to when you should theoretically be just about to forget something, and is obviously much more efficient than just reviewing everything every time you study.) My personal aim is to learn 10 characters a day from the list for HSK level 4. HSK is the government’s standardised test of Mandarin proficiency for non-native speakers, and 10 characters a day should be about right to get me up to speed in time for June, when I hope to take the exam.

Speaking proficiency is more important to me than reading or writing, and I’m still thinking about possible goals for that. One idea I’m considering is posting a weekly or fortnightly video of me speaking Mandarin on this blog, which should help to motivate me and provide some means of assessing progress.

Update: I’ve created a page here with a list of the characters I’ve learnt to write for this challenge. It should be updated daily from Monday the 25th of February 2013 until after my HSK exam.

]]>http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/spring-festival-character-challenge/feed/2Lowering Your Expectationshttp://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/expectations/
http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/expectations/#commentsSat, 26 Jan 2013 15:45:19 +0000http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/?p=90I’ve returned to England for the winter holiday, and the journey back was much more pleasant than the journeyout. When I tried to check in for my first flight from Changsha to Beijing, I discovered that it had been cancelled. After the member of staff had finished explaining this at some length in English, I replied ‘Xiè xiè’ – ‘Thank you’ in Chinese. This caused her to physically jump off the ground in surprise, before recovering and rapidly firing off ‘Nǐ huì shuō Zhōngwén ma?!’ – ‘You can speak Chinese?!’.

Unfortunately this proved my undoing, as there followed a fairly long set of instructions about changing my ticket in Mandarin, which I needed to clarify in English. Nevertheless, her extremely gratifying initial reaction made any slight embarrassment at having to revert to English worth it.

My nascent Chinese came in handy a few more times before reaching home. I was upgraded to first class for the Changsha-Beijing flight, and – this being my first experience of such promiscuous luxury – felt the need to ask whether the packets of seaweed-coated peanuts strewn about the first-class lounge where I waited for the flight to arrive were complimentary. This could certainly have been achieved in English, but using Chinese gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside, and perhaps achieved a little something for the image of the ignorant Englishman abroad. My insistence on using Chinese where possible on board the first flight made both my day and the air hostess’s (whose day might otherwise have been spoiled by the passenger across the aisle, who seemed rather too used to travelling first class), and relieved the tedium of the 11-hour Beijing-Gatwick flight, as I was able to spend some of it standing at the back and attempting to converse with a steward.

Don’t get the idea that my Mandarin is good – I still have the conversational ability of an earthworm, and not even a Chinese one. My point is that even earthworm-esque Chinese can be useful.

When I left for China in September, I went with the aim of becoming ‘fluent’ in a year – anything less would be considered a failure. (My idea of fluency is something like ‘being able to converse about any everyday topic without significantly holding up the flow of conversation’.) There’s nothing wrong with lofty goals – indeed, another ambition of mine is to go from a decent club chess player to a Grandmaster, which could hardly be loftier. The problem comes with the idea of failure. I used to think that anything less than fluent Chinese was essentially useless, as you couldn’t use it to get work which relied on it (e.g. in translating/interpreting or most positions within China). Of course this is nonsense, and every level of a foreign language confers some benefits, from reading menus and getting around more easily in that country, to making human connections such as those talked about in this post which you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. (I’m sure some level of Chinese would also be a bonus for getting a job with any company which does business in China.) Likewise, each incremental improvement in chess understanding increases your ability to appreciate great games and enables slightly more satisfying tournament results.

Even if we can be philosophical about our (relative lack of) progress, and realise that a little is still better than nothing, it can be hard not to consider your efforts a failure when they are set beside the towering heights of your ambition. For this reason I think lowering your expectations temporarily – i.e. setting stretching but not impossible intermediate goals on your path to mastery – may be a good idea. Not setting intermediate goals has been one of the failures of my chess project and my Chinese project to date. Note that by ‘lowering your expectations’ I don’t necessarily mean forever relinquishing your aspirations to greatness; I simply mean setting a lower goal first, achieving it and appreciating it for a worthwhile end in itself, and then continuing on your path of improvement (should you feel that it’s a path still worth taking).

I’ll be blogging about my specific goals for the remainder of my adventure in China in the coming weeks.

]]>http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/expectations/feed/2Seek Truth, Foster Originality, and Live Up to the Name of Teacherhttp://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/teaching/
http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/teaching/#commentsMon, 22 Oct 2012 13:51:50 +0000http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/?p=63So goes the motto of East China Normal University, and I’ve already written a blog post with that title, but I like it so much that I felt my first post about teaching on this blog should share the title.

I wasn’t expecting to teach in China, but the virtual ink was not yet dry on my registration as a student when I was asked if I would teach a few periods a week. I couldn’t think of an excuse on the spot, so a week or so later I found myself pacing up and down my room wondering how to get through my first experience as a teacher the next morning. I’d been given no training, no syllabus, and no instruction of any kind other than to try to get the students talking as much as possible. Fortunately we live in an age where years of experience can be substituted for a little hastily-learned internet wisdom, so I started working my way through the blogs of previous foreign English teachers in China. When I was most of the way through a rather recondite treatise on ‘extrinsic and intrinsic motivators’ and their relation to ‘expectancy theory,’ I accepted that I wasn’t going to become a pro overnight, found an interestingish-sounding ‘introduction game,’ and went to bed.

Things are rarely as bad as you imagine they will be. Actually I’ve no idea if that’s true or not, but in this case the first lesson went relatively smoothly. I was a bit nervous, but I don’t think it was too obvious. My planned activity was a little chaotic, but it certainly got them talking (albeit mostly in Chinese). The timing was fine, and I was able to dismiss the class when the bell went after having completed the activity and even having set some impromptu homework.

I’ve got three classes, none of whom study English full-time. Two of them consist of civil engineering students (95% male), and the other studies Japanese (95% female). All have 30-40 students when everyone’s there, but that doesn’t seem to happen often and I haven’t been given a list of who’s meant to be present or been told what I’m supposed to do about it. I got the Japanese class first, which was probably lucky, as the girls are certainly easier to teach. (My second class was on a par with the first in terms of difficulty, the change in predominant gender being counteracted by the fact that I’d already practised the lesson once.)

For now the name of the game is still survival. My latest homework on the proposed UK badger cull aims to start fostering a little originality, but I have my doubts about whether or not my students’ English level will be good enough to cope with it. Seeking truth and living up to the name of teacher can come next week.

Last Saturday I visited Héng Shān (‘Balancing Mountain’), one of ‘The Five Great Mountains‘ of China, with a small group of foreign English teachers and a Chinese student. Wikipedia informs me that these mountains used to be visited by emperors, no doubt with many servants in attendance, and I was half expecting the slopes to be as crowded as during an imperial visit, since we went during a week of national holiday. Fortunately our Chinese friend had timed the visit masterfully, as most people stay at home with their families during Mid-Autumn Festival weekend, visiting tourist spots later in the week.

Although only 60 miles / 100 km away, the bus took around three hours to get there, bumping along dusty little rutted country roads which at times made me miss the ‘box‘ I used to wear for school cricket matches. As we neared our destination a profusion of roadside shops sprung up, all offering identical brightly-coloured packages, which we took to be incense for burning in the temples on the mountain.

I’ll illustrate the journey up the mountain with pictures rather than words, except to note that the scenery reminded my American friend of his local Blue Ridge Mountains, but was a far cry from the splendour of my local Quantocks!

We cheated a little and did part of the journey by cable car – probably a wise choice as friends who went later in the week spent seven hours on the ascent! Here’s the view from/at the top:

The atmosphere at the top was not quite the quiet monastic idyll I might have expected at a Buddhist temple. The ‘incense’ I mentioned earlier turned out to be fireworks(!), which people threw into the building pictured second in the last set of photos, inside which a fire was blazing. Consequently the summit was both smoky and noisy.

That’s all for now. The next update will probably be about teaching.

P.S. The song ‘Country Roads‘ has been in my head ever since the visit.

]]>http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/mountain/feed/0Mooncake Dayhttp://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/mooncake/
http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/mooncake/#commentsTue, 02 Oct 2012 13:07:33 +0000http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/?p=35Sunday was the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a traditional celebration held around the time of the autumn equinox. The main activity seems to be consuming large quantities of 月饼 (mooncakes); in fact this is so ubiquitous that many call the festival ‘Mooncake Day.’ I rather like this unpretentious recognition of the real meaning of the occasion, and propose that Easter Sunday is renamed ‘Chocolate Egg Day.’

The typical mooncake is a bizarre hybrid of a Scotch egg and a treacle tart. Specifically, a layer of soft, chewy pastry covers a sweet, gloopy substance, and within the gloop hides a salty egg yolk (the ‘moon’). The filling can be fruit-flavoured, lotus-flavoured, or even beef or pork flavoured. Not all contain yolks, and some are altogether different; pictured below is a greasy one with flaky pastry and a nut/herb mixture inside, alongside three of its more common brethren. See the Wikipedia article for a full treatment.

After Mooncake Day came China’s National Day, which commemorates the founding of the People’s Republic of China on the 1st of October, 1949. Attached to National Day is a week-long public holiday, which is nice timing for me as it gives me a chance to assess my Chinese learning so far, do some lesson planning (I’m teaching a few periods of English a week) and catch up on blogging! With that in mind, you can expect to see a post about my visit to Hengshan – ‘one of the five most beautiful mountains in China’ – and perhaps some thoughts on studying, teaching and settling in later in the week.

]]>http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/mooncake/feed/4Into the Armpit, part 2http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/armpit2/
http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/armpit2/#commentsSun, 23 Sep 2012 05:28:45 +0000http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/?p=30Once I had finally managed to board the plane successfully, the onward flight to Changsha was pleasant enough. We were informed that the staff of China Southern Airlines would ‘cherish every opportunity of service’; a promise they fulfilled by providing me with a Coke, some peanut biscuits and the English-language ‘China Daily’ newspaper. This featured articles about, amongst other things, the plight of China’s migrant workers, who leave their families behind in rural areas in search of work in the big cities, and the arrogance of Western nations in assuming that their democratic systems are the best form of government for every society.

Upon arrival in Changsha I collected my luggage and made my way to the exit easily, but purchasing a bus ticket to Xiangtan was a little more difficult. Nobody spoke any English, and my pronunciation of Xiangtan was so bad that I had to write it down before they could be sure of where I wanted it to go. Nevertheless, this was at length accomplished, and I settled down to wait for the next bus.

The bus turned out to be a coach not dissimilar to any English one, except that the driver smoked on-board as well as off. About half an hour into our journey we stopped on a small semi-rural road. It was so dark outside that it was hard to make out what was going on, but I think our path was blocked by a lorry whose driver had decided to have an extended cigarette break and had just parked in the road. The smaller cars and mopeds were able to either squeeze past it or perform a U-turn, both of which involved a good deal of horn-beeping, but we just had to sit and wait for the driver to return, which he did after perhaps 15 minutes.

After another half hour of driving we entered Xiangtan, whereupon most of the passengers started holding shouted conversations with the bus driver simultaneously, trying to get him to stop in their desired location. There was only one advertised stop, and I had no idea how to identify it, so I got off when it seemed all of the remaining passengers were also disembarking. As I gazed around in bewilderment wondering how I might go about calling a taxi I had a great stroke of luck. Two of my fellow coach passengers turned out be students at Xiangtan University, and one of them approached me and spoke good enough English to work out that I was also trying to get there. The three of us got back onto the coach which took us a bit further, and they then set about trying to flag down a taxi. After a couple of minutes an unmarked car did a U-turn in the midst of fairly fast-moving traffic, and pulled up beside us. My suitcase wouldn’t fit in the boot, but the female driver was content to leave it poking out and close the boot as far as it would go. Then we were off, horn blaring, seatbelts unfastened (except for me), on the wrong side of the road as often as not and with the driver chatting on her mobile. I was already somewhat accustomed to the Chinese style of driving from my visit to Shanghai two years ago, and so wasn’t as alarmed as I might otherwise have been. I haven’t looked up any traffic accident statistics, but my suspicion is that the Chinese are simply forced to learn to be better drivers than their British counterparts, and the chaotic nature of their roads doesn’t lead to many more accidents. In any case, I arrived at the university unscathed at around 10 pm.

Here again my student helper was very useful. She fetched two of her friends and together they managed to work out where the building I needed to go to was and take me there. Even late at night there were around 5 staff members there, all of whom turned out to have a look at me and help with issuing my room keys. I have since learned that none of the receptionists at the International Exchange Centre speak any English, so had I not had the students with me this bit would have been tricky. After showing me to my room the students helped me with one final thing, taking me to an internet cafe type place where everyone was playing World of Warcraft and where I used the one spare computer to send an e-mail home saying that I’d arrived.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned – you never know, maybe the next update will be before October!

]]>http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/armpit2/feed/1Into the Armpit, part 1http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/armpit1/
http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/armpit1/#commentsTue, 11 Sep 2012 13:32:17 +0000http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/?p=20It would have been naive to suppose that the six thousand mile journey to the ‘armpit of China’ would be without incident. (I’ve seen Xiangtan described that way somewhere on the internet, but until I know it well enough to judge I shall assume it’s an unfair label.) The staff at Heathrow were initially confused by the ’000 days’ duration of stay on my visa, even though that’s what’s printed on all student visas. When they saw that my flight ticket was only one way they made me sign a document to say I didn’t mind if I was deported straight back home after arriving in China; fortunately that hasn’t happened yet.

The flight to Guangzhou took a little over 11 hours and was as comfortable as could reasonably have been hoped for in economy class. Despite having left Heathrow a little late, we arrived on time and I had about an hour’s wait at the departure gate for my connection to Changsha. I passed the time by purchasing a bottle of over-priced Tibetan spring water – the significance of which will become apparent later in this tale – and by sitting and staring at the departures board. In due course the gate opened, and when we were all packed onto a bus and ready to go to the plane an official jumped on board holding a piece of paper with my name on it. He said something about my luggage, so I followed him back through the airport to customs, hitching a lift on a surprisingly speedy indoor buggy for part of the way and jogging the rest.

Security Official No. 1 awaited us at the end our journey, guarding my battered old orange suitcase, which she asked me to open. When tracing a square with her fingers on the topmost item inside failed to elicit anything but bemusement from me, she rummaged to the bottom to uncover my chess board. “Chess”, I said. “Like Xiangqi.” That was enough to satisfy her, so I closed the suitcase and we were off again, this time running to the check-in desk. There I was told that check-in had closed 10 minutes ago and I would have to await the next flight in 2 hours’ time.

When I had accepted my fate and checked my luggage onto the new flight, I made my way back to departures, only to be stopped just before going through the hand-luggage-scanning bit by an out-of-breath member of staff. I was escorted back to check-in, where Security Official No. 2 was frowning at the X-ray of my suitcase on his screen. This time the problem was my year’s supply of deodorant, which is very hard to come by in China. The official finally agreed to let me keep 3 cans, and initially suggested I take the other 2 on as hand luggage, but confiscated them when it was pointed out to him that flammable liquid was even less likely to be welcome there.

Off to departures again, and through the scanner with me and my hand luggage. I had to wait for a while the Russian in front of me tried to explain why his litre of vodka should be allowed on the flight, to no avail. I must admit that the amusing scene cheered me considerably after the loss of my deodorant, but my schadenfreude turned to dismay when I saw Security Official No. 3 turn to my quarter-drunk bottle of priceless Tibetan spring water. “No,” she announced, waggling the offending item in my face. “But I bought it in…,” I began. “No!” The bottle was slammed down on to the table. Damned if I’m letting them have it, I thought, and reached out a hand. “Let me drink it then.” I upended the bottle, glugging down half and spilling the other half down my top, before trudging off to departures one final time to reflect on the elaborate plot to rob me of my nectar, and await my onward flight.

Part 2 to follow, hopefully a little more quickly than part 1.

]]>http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/armpit1/feed/3Moving to Chinahttp://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/moving/
http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/moving/#commentsMon, 27 Aug 2012 16:10:42 +0000http://www.chinablog.webwhizz.com/?p=1Tomorrow I’ll be moving to Hunan province, China, to study Mandarin for a year in Xiangtan University. I’ll be using this blog to record anything that interests me (and could conceivably interest others) while I’m there. I’ve been to China once before, in July 2010, when I spent 3 weeks on the UK’s Study China Programme in Shanghai. My blog from that trip can be seen here.